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Professor Creates His Own Cisco Manual
yootje writes "ZDnet is running a story about a professor who made his own Cisco networking textbook, with 800 pages: "Computing instructor Matt Basham's suggestions for improving Cisco Systems' official training manuals fell on deaf ears for years. But he appears to have the networking giant's attention now." The professor made his book available for free on his website."
Sue him for what exactly? He wrote the book and unless he's plagiarised some of its content, then they wouldn't have much of a case. Given his profession, I'm sure he's more than capable of writing this book on his own.
He's the owner of the material, and I seriously doubt that he can be sued for anything at all.
"About half the people in this program barely know how to turn on a computer, so we need to start with the very basics. The Cisco curriculum and texts assume a certain level of knowledge."
I'm not so sure this is the best idea hes dumbed down the manual to make room for the computer illiterate.. shoehorning students with no technical background into a network administration course seems like a bit of a waste.
There is a lot to be said for having a sepperate class to teach the basics.
They probably figured, "we can charge a ton for our cert's forever, because no one is going to take the time to write a book." OOPS! I hope other people follow suit and finally we will be rid of the "if you're not certified, you can't have learned it" business principle.
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In this day and age...
In this day and age, laws are irrelevant. You just have to be able to financially afford more time in court.
Scratch the "in this day and age" part, though...it's always been true.
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Huh?! What API? Unless your considering router configs as application programs, there is no API. And there are literally hundreds of books written about cisco configuration, beyond those published by/for cisco.
How did this seriously strange view of IP law get modded up?
You don't need permission from anybody to publish an API. There is no special copyright law covering API specifications.
Perhaps you are thinking of trade-secret status?
Well, if something has been publicly published, it doesn't doesn't get trade-secret status. And that goes even if they put some silly 'license' on their documentation.
(See for instance the BSDi case, where the Unix sources were found not to have trade-secret status without even being public, but simply because they had been seen by so many people. And that is despite the fact that they even had written agreements with all of them.)
You don't have to get a license to publish an original book on anything, ever.
Do you know what a license is? A license is permission from a rights-holder to exercise an otherwise exclusive right.
For copyright, that means performing, reproducing and creating derivatives of copyrighted material.
For patents, that means the right to manufacture and use the invention.
For trade-secrets, that means the right to divulge and use commercially the trade secret.
Now, if I chose not to publish my API secret, then it may be a trade-secret, in which case you may not have the right to publish it if you happen to be 'in' on it. APIs can however be reverse-engineered. You can reverse-engineer an API without any trade-secret knowledge (i.e. 'clean-room') and publish that, that is perfectly legal.
Perhaps you think that the API itself can be copyrighted, and that a description of the API is a derivative work? Well, that's a theory, but very dubious legally.
Under copyright law, code is separated into the "expressional" and "functional" parts, and APIs reasonably always fall into the latter part, and are therefore not copyrightable. In case law, good room is generally given for compatibility code, being functional. (Again, you can see the BSDi case, where it was found that header files describing the same Unix API were not infringing)
If the API itself is not copyrighted, something which has yet to be seen, the description of the API cannot be a derivative work.
Naturally, the description itself can be copyrighted, including the official description, (e.g. the API specification) but anyone can write their own description.